Debates over immigration will often go something like this.
Pro-side: Immigrants are good for the economy.
Anti-side: But they commit crimes, use welfare, vote for the wrong policies, and change the culture.
Pro: Just punish the criminals, take away immigrants’ right to vote, require assimilation, and don’t let them go on welfare. These are called keyhole solutions.
Anti: That’s unrealistic.
The average GDP per capita in Haiti, adjusted for PPP, is about $3,200 a year, while the typical income of a household headed by a Haitian-American is $72,000 a year. These figures are not directly comparable, but we know that a Haitian coming to America massively improves their living standards. A person working a job is also good for Americans. Some say that immigrants suppress the wages of natives or take away employment opportunities, but I’ve shown that these are very stupid arguments, and you should never take seriously anyone who invokes “wage competition” or “protecting jobs” as a reason to oppose immigration, free trade, or the deployment of new technologies.
Yet while the purely economic case against immigration can be cast aside as degrowther nonsense, other restrictionist arguments have more merit. Immigrants do in fact sometimes fail to assimilate, vote for left-wing parties, commit crimes, and use welfare. The restrictionist side assumes that the people we let in will either always have the exact same rights as everyone else, or they will be kept out.
Yet the idea that keyhole solutions are politically unrealistic would predict that public opinion is particularly hostile to restricting immigrant rights and privileges. Although Americans are ambivalent about immigration as a general matter, once you start placing conditions on what new arrivals can do, support for welcoming them into the country goes up.
In 2006, Gallup gathered data from different polls on attitudes toward immigration. When asked whether illegal immigrants should stay, for example, Americans were more supportive if the question included conditions such as paying back taxes, paying a fine, and learning English. Americans also overwhelmingly like the ideas of restricting welfare to immigrants and deporting criminals.
A PRRI poll asked Americans in 2013 whether illegal immigrants in this country should be given a path to citizenship. Fifty-nine percent said yes when no requirements were mentioned, compared to 68% when the survey added “certain requirements,” and 71% when those requirements were spelled out.
A 2025 paper showed that, in Switzerland and the United States, citizens were much more likely to accept an immigrant if told they would not be allowed to use welfare, with the effect being strongest among conservatives. Making residency temporary had small and inconsistent effects, slightly increasing pro-immigrant attitudes in America and somewhat decreasing them in Switzerland.
In other words, polling and survey results show precisely the opposite of what opponents of keyhole solutions would expect. People like immigration with conditions more than they like immigration without any conditions!
Regarding the political views of new arrivals, the Constitution won’t let you deny voting rights to citizens. But if that’s your concern, you can simply extend the period of permanent residency before green card holders are naturalized, in which case they won’t vote for a very long time. The 2024 election proved that immigrants can be induced to vote Republican, and refuted the nativist assumption that elections are simply ethnic head counts. Citizenship, after all, is not necessary to get the economic or humanitarian benefits of immigration.
This is the state of public opinion even without anyone arguing for keyhole solutions. The Biden administration was interested in legalizing and protecting as many people as possible without much thought given to negative externalities. Kamala's famous promise of free sex-change operations for illegals in custody reflected the spirit of the time. The Trump administration, in contrast, is opposed to immigration virtually across the board, regardless of how highly skilled or how clearly the country benefits.
A politician who advocated a more open immigration system, conditional on learning English, banning welfare use, and zero-tolerance for crime, would be more in line with public opinion than either Republicans or Democrats. One could even go a step further, and perhaps place a special tax on new arrivals that will collect money to be redistributed to natives. There’s no polling on this, but it’s the type of policy you could imagine being very popular.
Arguments with nativists have a kind of whack-a-mole quality, because they tend not to be honest about their motivations with themselves or others. Rightists used to complain about immigrants not working and going on welfare, but since they can’t make that argument against Indians, they’ll now say they are “taking jobs.” Basically, immigrants are committing harms whether they’re working or not. When a movement makes both these arguments simultaneously, it is a good indicator that this isn’t about either economics or the welfare state.
In the last few years, watching what the right has turned into, I have become a lot more sympathetic to the woke idea that racism is a dominant factor in American political life. The wokes are wrong about markets, because that’s the domain in which people have to suffer the consequences of their actions, so racism isn’t important when it comes to questions like which groups succeed or fail. But politics is largely about expressive preferences, and here primitive instincts can run wild. Half of the political spectrum now organizes itself around signalling to one another that they dislike outsiders, and right-wing “intellectual” life, to the extent that such a thing exists, is built around reverse engineering justifications for the feelings of racists. It’s amazing how much right-wing economic, historical, sociological, and statistical analysis is based on constructing reality so that it confirms the grand narrative that foreigners are dangerous and harmful.
In debates over “Caesarism,” for example, perhaps the main Yarvin argument for why things are broken enough for America to need a dictator is that the country is overrun by immigrants. His opponents respond that, actually, Trump is closing the border and deporting a lot of people. The entire premise of the debate is that the ability to restrict immigration is the ultimate measure of how our political system is doing, since that is by far the greatest threat to the country.
Similarly, anger at female voters is often justified on the grounds that they are liberal, and it is their views on immigration rather than economic policy that matter. When Trump supporters do get upset about government spending or the welfare state, even here there has to be some kind of anti-foreigner angle for it to take off in right-wing media, hence the Nick Shirley phenomenon.
So any Republican politician who took my advice and adopted an immigration with conditions platform would be destroyed by the right-wing press and influencer space if it ended up on their radar. This would be true even if most Republican voters could be convinced that such policies are a good idea. For a presidential candidate to show any inclination to be pro-immigration at all would turn nearly everyone who matters in right-wing media against them, and make it difficult to have a political future. Yet the keyhole solutions position is much more tenable in situations where you only have to worry about what the voters think and right-wing media is not paying attention, which is the case in most races beneath the presidential level.
There is perhaps more potential for a Democratic presidential candidate to take up the idea of immigration with conditions. Yes, the extreme wing of the party wouldn’t like it, but the difference between the two sides of the political spectrum is that the right prioritizes immigration a lot more, so it’s more difficult for Republicans to dissent from the loudest voices within their coalition. Note that it was conservative media, not the left, that killed Bush and Obama era attempts at reform.
That’s the short-term analysis, but in the long run I think that persuasion can do a lot of good. There is a core of right-wingers who have made hating immigrants their entire identity. They put out certain arguments, and others who are not simply motivated by bigotry end up being influenced by them. So it’s worth shooting down false beliefs about topics like the economic harms of H1B visas and immigrant crime, and also emphasizing that, to the extent that complaints about immigration do have merit, keyhole solutions can provide an answer.
Persuasion can eventually change people’s views, which is something that has become clear to me over the last fifteen years as I’ve seen the fringe white nationalist perspective on immigration become almost fully adopted by the mainstream conservative movement, with the only difference being that the latter usually insists that it is not motivated by race. White nationalists and Trump saw an opening, in the sense that Republican voters were a lot more anti-immigration than the politicians who represented them. Today, the right has swung far in the other direction, with the Trump administration and conservative influencers opposing even skilled, legal immigration, which generally remains popular across the political spectrum. That can similarly create opportunities for ambitious politicians to try something different. Either way, a future of higher levels of immigration subject to conditions is so potentially beneficial to the country that it is worth fighting for.
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The keyhole solution idea sounds great in theory but it is not very credible in practice. Reagan's 1986 amnesty deal was basically an attempt at a keyhole bargain. The Democrats were happy to take the amnesty and then de facto renege on the restrictions once they got in power. A large pool of immigrants creates a latent "pot of gold" of potential voters that becomes too tempting to pass up for the political party that expects a net electoral benefit from regularizing illegals and expediting the citizenship pipeline. Over time the welfare restrictions get relaxed, interior deportations become infrequent even for criminals due to local non-cooperation (sanctuary cities) and high cost, and the requirement to learn the language gets watered down or abolished.
For the keyhole solution to be viable it would have to effectively be written in stone through a constitutional amendment that provides standing to sue to all states and to individual voters through a private right of action (to prevent future de facto executive nullification). Illegals must be given a lifetime ban on ever getting the ability to vote in elections of any level (even municipal elections). Company executuves that knowingly hire illegal or out-of-status workers must be given long mandatory minimum prison sentences. The constitutional amendment would also need a clause that forces all government and police officials to cooperate with legal immigration enforcement efforts upon threat of personally going to prison (a ban on sanctuary locales that has teeth). Otherwise the keyhole restrictions would die a slow death of many silent compromises.
Former pro-migration guy here, who recently got flipped by arguments/stats about electoral dynamics, crime, culture, social trust, and state security. More posts like this, please. I’ve scrolled past almost all your recent posts since they deal with economic arguments against migration (which I never believed), but now that you’re dealing with the actual reasons why nonmorons question conventional border policies, you’ve caught my attention!